The Turtle Boy - Kealan Patrick Burke

'Even as they cast one last glance over their shoulders at the low, hulking building - the antithesis of summers glow - the school had seemed smug and patient knowing the children's leashes were not as long as they thought.' Kealan Patrick Burke

Oh my goodness me, what an awesome story!

Timmy Quinn is enjoying his summer holidays. He and his best friend Pete decide to go down to the local pond to have an adventure. Unfortunately for them, they stumble upon an eerie looking child... a boy who looks a bit like a turtle. He is dipping his feet in the pond, apparently feeding the turtles. This visit to the pond leads to life changing events for Timmy.

This is a straight up ghost story, and a creepy one at that. Congratulations to Mr. Burke, he managed to shake me right up! Burke's writing is just so precise, and to be honest is exactly what I want out of a ghost story. I really enjoyed the prose, Burke is an excellent writer with a brilliant command of language. There were a couple of times during the 'turtle judgement' scene where I felt that Burke slightly lost his way, but he managed to keep up the pace of the narrative and keep it nice and creepy!

When I first started reading it, I really thought I was going to read a coming-of-age story (bildungsroman) in the same vein as 'The Body' by Stephen King, and I guess that in a way, I did, it just wasn't a conventional coming-of-age tale.

In the true style of short stories many details of main characters are missing, and all that is left are the bare skeletons of the story.  The tale is polished, awesome, scary and quite imaginative if I do say so myself. The fact that it was free on Kindle just made it so much better, especially as my last few experiences with free Kindle books have not particularly been good ones.

This novelette is the first of a number of short stories featuring Timmy Quinn (and I believe that there is also a full length novel too), and I am more than happy to get hold of them as soon as possible.

Emma reviewed this tale a long while back, so I recommend you pop over to MabisMab for her take on this ghost story.